“... to us as Fonda is in 12 Angry Men? Could he have played the chump in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve without angling for sympathy? There has always been a strain of American acting that is resolute, simple and content to trust a known self. You can see it in some of Brando’s contemporaries – Robert Mitchum, William Holden, Glenn Ford or, coming up ...”

“... multiplied and developed. In 1914, Zinaida Poliakova (now Gubbay) was a well-established society lady in Paris. Yet she assumed an important leadership role during the First World War, when she initiated the Society to Aid Jewish Victims of War and became its first president. Nor should we be surprised to find the playboy-businessman Victor Sassoon working ...”

“... too. When, in the Soviet Union in early 1930s, she was forced to entertain George Bernard Shaw and Lady Astor on a visit, she wore her oldest dress, claimed to have no sugar in the house for tea, and was straight-out rude to Shaw when, rattled by her evident hostility, he expressed the hope that Lenin had left her well provided for. To be sure, Krupskaya ...”

“... committee to publish evidence it had been warned might breach a court order imposed by Lady Dorrian, the trial judge, to protect the complainers’ anonymity.When Dorrian refused its requests to alter her order, merely adding a clause to reinforce its existing scope, the Spectator nevertheless declared it a victory. When the Scottish Parliamentary ...”

“... after it was opened with great pomp in the spring of 1869. Hawkers preferred not to be herded into Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts’s carefully designed neo-Gothic market; the view its founder took of them might have seemed clear from the way the space was decorated with injunctions to ‘Be Sober’ and ‘Be Courteous’. Meanwhile, street markets, which saw ...”

“... evicted by its new owners. The contents of her pantry below her on the steps, she looks like a bag lady. But that was not the end of the Joséphine Baker story. She returned to the Paris stage for the 50th anniversary of La Revue nègre in 1975 and died later that year at 68 after the second performance of her acclaimed show Joséphine. It was a triumphant ...”

“... that sticks in the mind. It also uses the imagery of love. There is a famous passage about a lady who lives in a castle beset by enemies. A powerful king comes to her aid, giving her protection and showering her with gifts. She treats him with contempt. He visits her, he is ‘of alle men feherst to bihalden’ (‘of all men fairest to ...”

“... director, Christopher DeMuth, responded that he had ‘communed’ with the ghost of the Iron Lady, who had let him know that she was ‘on board’ with the circus of flag, family and nation. When the proceedings began, the agenda was dominated by wokeness. Woke schools and woke universities, of course, but also the new nemesis: ‘woke capital’.Woke ...”

“... excited by the ‘children in rags, the scabies, the ringworm, the lepers’. Shelley’s friend Lady Blessington, who was rather shrewder, recognised the element of showmanship in this ‘hyperbolical’ performance to a captive audience, most of whom had little means of knowing what they should pay or whose services they might best employ.The hermitage was ...”

“... insistence on an eastern orientation and the nature of the site they had acquired from Lady Russell (the Bedford family owned much of Bloomsbury). It was quite small, already surrounded by houses, and longer from north to south than from east to west. James Gibbs, one of the surveyors appointed by the Commissioners (Hawksmoor was the ...”

“... an Irishwoman for whom the house and its lands were nonetheless a ‘sacred trust’. The same lady strongly believed that the English deserved to lose the war, for theirs was not a Christian cause. So who were the real patriots? And for what?Such snapshots of discordant individuals are refreshing because more academic studies of patriotism and nationalism ...”

“... was comparable to that of Shakespeare and Spinoza (though probably more as foil than as model). Lady Anne Monson, the British botanist of Indian plants, toasted Linnaeus as ‘king of all the realms of nature’ before raising her glass to George III, who was king merely of Britain and Ireland.Until his eyesight failed him in old age, he prided himself on ...”

“... had made clumsy efforts to get the Times to replace Ebbutt as its correspondent by suggesting to Lady Astor, whose family owned the paper, that he was a drunk. In power, they switched to more direct methods. Returning home from a restaurant late one night, Ebbutt saw armed police running into the building with rifles at the ready; moments later ‘the ...”

“... respect’ owed by the courts to the executive and legislature was another favourite formula. Lady Hale wrote in 2008 that ‘the doctrine of the “margin of appreciation” as applied in Strasbourg has no application in domestic law.’ One of her colleagues, Lord Mance, saw it as merely a ‘principle which distributes responsibility between the ...”

“... usage. Sometimes that sexism becomes explicit, as when Alexander Pope begins his ‘Epistle to a Lady on the Characters of Women’ with ‘Nothing so true as what you once let fall:/“Most Women have no Characters at all.”’ In that couplet Pope was responding to a long-standing tradition that linked character with maleness. When sometime around 320 ...”